Never look back?

Some nine months ago, I gave an interview (in French!) to Maud Ingarao. She was preparing a series of papers presenting German DH projects for the French public, so I had the pleasure to come after Christof Schöch and Torsten Schaßan (excusez du peu). I had the feeling this was a little bit premature considering how foggy the whole concept of the project was. At that point, I had not the feeling that I was managering it, more that is was managering me. But the deal was to have something about a project that was right in the starting blocks.

I was afraid to have changed radically my mind on some crucial topics in the meantime and was somewhat dreading the moment when I would have to face the transcription of the interview. Well, here it is (I added a couple of hyperlinks in the interview text, linking to some relevant blog posts I wrote in between). In many ways, the questions that I considered important then are still important now, even if my answers might now be slightly different – and a few new questions have come on my radar too.

First, there is the question of the relation between paper edition and digital edition. So early in the process of getting digital as March 2011, I still saw as my primary aim to produce books, paper editions. In fact, I think that I did not envision back then how powerful markup can be to sort out larger corpora. Once I started seeing the way we could link the different subcorpora of our digital edition together, I also considered the digital edition on a completely new scale. I still am the boss of a small project. But a small project with an evolving potential to becoming a middle-sized one. (note to self: need to move on seriously on the indexing)

Second, I was baffled when I realized that I did not mention Long Time Archiving at all during the whole interview. It is true, too, that the importance of that aspect of project development only became clear to me during the TEI-conference in Würzburg in October. But then, it revealed immediately its splendor as a long-time malediction – only making me more eager to find a solution involving not only me in my pretty unstable institutional situation, but partners that would still be here when I would be long gone. And here I must say that the recent developments of the cooperation with Michael Seadle and, most of all, with Jutta Weber and the kalliope team, worked out faster than I first thought. We are getting closer to a more than satisfactory solution.

And a third thing that might be worth mentioning here: project management in DH seems to be very different in France and in Germany. So few project managers know about their own TEI schema, understand the logic of the encoding decisions made for their own project in France, while I see a lot of people working on both the technical and the let’s-name-them-philosophical issues in Germany. The two digital cultures that develop in parallel look very different. The reasons for that are probably historical, but I find it worrying when it comes to working out common projects. I already have more and more the feeling to be considered like a technician by the elder generation in my scientific community, probably the younger one will start harvesting a similar feeling soon – as for France, I guess I will pass for a decent ingénieur soon.

Again: you can find our actual project guidelines as an attachment here, probably the best way to know where we stand!

Anne Baillot

I studied German Studies and Philosophy in Paris where I got my PhD in 2002. I then moved to Berlin, where I have been living & doing research ever since. My areas of specialty include German literature, Digital Humanities, textual scholarship and intellectual history. I am currently working at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin as an expert in digital technologies for the humanities.